


Where We Diverged

by Kara_Sevda



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Episode VIII will either condemn me or...continue to make me feel guilty, F/M, potential incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-08 11:42:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5495828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kara_Sevda/pseuds/Kara_Sevda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Weakness coming back to haunt him, and he is not sure what to do with the evidence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

“There’s a place for you here, if you want to stay,” the General Organa tells her. Not just a single utterance of polite invitation but a repeated overture of welcome, words supplemented by touch as dry palms clasp around Rey’s hand. The shine in the woman’s eyes, the cheek-furrowing smile. Maternal responses that Rey has long yearned for, and as she contemplates what it’d be like to have such an esteemed woman for a mother, her unbridled thoughts flit to the face of the General’s trueborn child. The face he’d shown to her, and perhaps it would have been better if he had remained masked and nameless, archetype of nightmare rather than someone’s son.

Around the Resistance base, others echo the General. Clearing a bench for her in their workshop, the mechanics supervise her programming of some of the more sophisticated droids, offering sparse but encouraging suggestions and bringing her a variety of different beverages as the hours melt into each other. Thus far, she likes the tea sweetened with a swirl of blue milk the best. Spotting her through the glass of the med bay on several occasions, Finn’s pilot friend calls out to her and cheekily informs her there’s an X-wing waiting with her name on it. Eyes squinting against the glare of the next midday, Rey watches the squadron soar through a couple of drills and climbs into the seat on the third afternoon. When she clambers out of the cockpit, Poe gives her a two-fingered salute and teases that he’ll have to get jackets for both Finn and her to match his own.

There’s a place for her here, and yet, when she tries to hold herself still at night and wait for sleep to catch her, the voice that seeps into her head begins to earn her serious consideration.

 _You need a teacher._ So strangely insistent that he should occupy such a role in her life.

Why, she grumbles into her pillow, out of all the voices in the galaxies was this the one she could hear most clearly?

Gradually, grudgingly, she concedes to herself, not to him, that the idea is not without value, even if it came from the wrong person. Thusly, after a relatively uneventful Falcon-navigated flight across several star systems, she finds herself affirming yes, yes she came looking for a teacher.

 

* * *

 

Both of his teachers would’ve agreed on this: he is not the best communicator. As he delivers his account of the bout in the forest, he modulates his words, his tone, and even the tumultuous thoughts he’d rather not broadcast too clearly in the Supreme Leader's presence. Ire and umbrage, these are to be expected, metallic on his tongue as if the blood from his facial gash never ceased dripping into his mouth. The red-tinged images rousing those emotions to the forefront of his mind: his father’s eyes, resigned and already forgiving, in the slain man’s last moments, the recurring interference of that traitor who’d dared to brandish his ancestry’s weapon against him, and the saber he desired commanded into flight by the girl who should’ve similarly been dismissed as insignificant. He cannot hide much before Snoke and harbors doubt about his ability to hide anything at all, but he knows the belligerence, the self-disgust, the shame that Snoke expects and those are the emotions he allows to surge in him for the Supreme Leader to feed upon and assess.

And when Snoke asks about the source of his new facial scar, Kylo Ren places the emphasis on his wounds from his father’s enraged comrade, on the earth that was torn asunder beneath his feet. It earns him a derisive snort from Hux, who snidely suggests that they ought to dispatch the stormtroopers who brought him back from bleeding in the snow lest mutinous talk spreads among the ranks.

It also earns him the keeping of information to himself, the bits and pieces he’d gleaned from the scavenger’s mind. Row after row of tallies scored into the sand-buried wall of what served as the most basic of shelters. Solicitation from privateers making temporary stops, their slick conversation on how they didn’t usually take additional passengers without a fee, but they’d make an exception for her. Fear of the foreign weapon nestled in a nondescript box and yet reassurance when she’d clutched it for a second time.

At night, the flashes of imagery, of feeling, begin to acquire greater clarity, and he knows what he absorbs is no longer tied to the past but rather, conveying the present. Island green after a lifetime of barely knowing the color. Gulls beating the full strength of their wings against strong winds, above the protruding cliffs where she now sits. Sometimes with an old man. More often alone. So many new faces and companions in a short span and yet still lonely. The old man is no longer used to conversing with younglings.

Browsing through the Order’s archives, Kylo studies the sketch of the bird he reproduced by hand before taking secret pleasure in erasing the file hovering above the lectern. Meditation has perhaps never before come so easily as it has recently. Motivation wipes competing distractions from his mind until he sees the AT-AT hull as clearly as if he were the one scratching its skeleton. By his own rough calculations, the scavenger appears to be around the same age another girl would’ve been.

Weakness coming back to haunt him with a vicious bite, and he is not sure what to do with the evidence.

 

* * *

 

 _A smile pushes her cheeks even rounder when she sees the boy in the courtyard garden. Each time he comes back, he seems to inhabit more space, more presence than before. The adults had teased him that he’d be taller than a Wookiee any day now._ _She hasn’t seen him for several months, which to her feels like several years, but she shouts out his name as if it were just yesterday when he’d left and he gives a quick wave before his hand returns to the branch for balancing support._

_“Here, catch,” he says from above her, and obediently, she extends her hands, childishly curled as if to cup the falling fruit, and if he’d actually tossed it, she would’ve missed._

_The fruit jerks to a floating angle right above her hairline though, as if an invisible thread had caught the stem, and when she reaches out again, it dangles away from her. A tug, and the fruit shoots back up in the air, veering back into his waiting hand._

_“Easier than it was before,” the boy tells her. “Uncle Luke has me lifting things that weigh up to a whole person.”_

_He notices the pout on her face though, and with a sigh, he drops to the ground, hands her the fruit, and tells her to eat it slowly so the pain won’t be too bad if she loses another babytooth._

It’s not the first time the courtyard has manifested in her dreams since landing on the island, but it is the first time she can hear the boy pronouncing Luke’s name. Peeling back the blanket from her pallet in the humble, stone hut of her master's dwelling, Rey untucks her legs from the quickly evaporating warmth and reaches for her leggings. As she steps outside, the color of the sky confirms that Luke’s granted her more sleep than usual. No adherence to the training regimen today. She’s suspected that the Falcon would need further repairs ever since they left the Resistance base, but it took her some time deciphering Chewie’s rough-throated communication to realize that the mending called for specialized parts manufactured by only a few sources. Unwilling to tamper too much with the foundational design, she’d finally decided that training could take a back seat for a period.

Luke himself is already immersed in morning meditation, and when the Falcon ascends with her two co-pilots on board, not even the roar of the engines disturbs the straight line of his back.

 

* * *

 

 _Jealousy and resentment are all too familiar to him. He feels the acute sting of both when his father leaves home for other planets. When his mother has one meeting after another, asking if one of her aides could take him elsewhere_ _now that he’s much too big to sit in her lap through long, dragging conferences. When Uncle Luke praises another trainee._

_He is less accustomed to feeling so at the dinner table._

_Brow knitted in concentration, mouth slightly agape with tongue flicking at her itching gums, the girl across from him steals back the shuura fruit he’d summoned from her plate. The fruit crashes down onto the dish, the sound betraying her clumsy manipulation and the pome’s over-ripeness._

_Another sound. The adults clapping, interspersed with nervous laughter and someone asking, “Luke, didn’t she just turn four?”_

_Ben doesn’t clap. Stays silent, brimming with rapid calculations. How old had he been when he performed the same trick? No one had showed him how. He’d taught himself while she’d watched the fruit rise and fall from his hands. Surely, she’d learned it from him._

_Across the table, she flashes an excited smile his way and insists, “I can go with you next time.”_

He hasn't dreamed of that boyhood home so vividly in years and wakes to a ceiling that doesn't match the one anticipated. For a futile half hour, he attempts meditation and is swarmed by unwelcome recollections. The tallest tree in the courtyard. Slices of shuura his mother transferred from her own plate to his. Sweetness on his tongue as Uncle Luke quietly brought up the name of a grandmother he'd never met. A face slanted towards the window of their transport, her question about where they were going nearly swallowed up in the small space between her breath and the glass. _Tears making the voice sound dangerously close to bawling levels this time. She looks out the window at the unfamiliar world. Sithspit, do they even have lighting after nightfall here? He can discern crude pit fires in the distance, and there's blood crusting on his hands, on the lower edges of his robes where a few stiffly clutched before falling at his feet, and bizarrely, he feels with increasing panic that the most terrifying task in the universe is taking care of a child. "Where are we going?" she asks again._

He staggers to a stand, leaves his quarters in a cold sweat, and is thankful that aside from regular patrol units, the corridors of the _Finalizer_ are otherwise empty at this hour, and even Hux is absent from the bridge as Kylo strides onto the command deck. As chance would have it, only two communications officers are manning the corner of the station when a transmission about a distinctive white freighter entering the Corellian system comes in. A blip of information easily wiped from their short term memories before they even pull it up for further inspection.

As he readies a shuttle for his individual departure, he realizes he can no longer accurately count the number of years since he has visited his father’s home planet.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

On Jakku, the trading outpost had consisted of a ring of dun-canopied tents, the full circle traversable in under five minutes and the wares under each awning as mundanely familiar to her as the rolls of flesh under Unkar Platt’s sagging chin. She’s aware of the arid planet’s reputation as a backwater sinkhole, but the noise and color and sheer activity of Coronet City heightens the dizzying realization of how different and quiet the desert had been, time trickling by like sand in an unforgiving hourglass.

Another dissimilarity. Back on Jakku, transactions had been simple. Unkar had dictated the terms, and she’d bit her tongue as he’d sneered at her scrounged-up offerings before slapping a ration package or two on the counter. Listening to the aggressively-voiced wrangling all around her in the bazaar terminal, Rey becomes quickly alert to how customers in the Corellian system are much more adamant on exercising their leverage in potential exchanges, many seemingly preferring to walk away with an offended air before merchants would court their return with lowered prices.

Her first attempt at bartering does not conclude to her advantage, and she’s silently debating about whether the Falcon really needs the latest model of blaster cannons when she feels the prickling at the back of her neck, the emanation of a presence she hasn’t felt since --

“Never mind,” she tells the vendor gruffly, her eyes darting to the stalls within visual proximity as her hands adjust the hood of her shawl to cover more bare cheek. “I don’t need it.”

“Ah, alright, but what about the Series 501 hyperdrive motivator you were looking at earlier?” comes the silky reply. “For the price of 10,000 credits, I’m extending you quite a bargain.”

Her backpedaling feet halt at the entrance of the stall as Rey glances hesitantly at the indicated component, and a pressure, not tangibly delivered by hand, pushes her fully back into the enclosure.

A gloved grip on her left wrist, firm as welded metal at first contact, and then it loosens to her surprise, though her apprehension does not lessen. No intent to harm radiating from him, unlike their last encounter. The same sense of urgency however as when he’d insisted on her need for instruction. A probe from him to her, the gentlest she has felt from him. _Don’t make a scene. Not here._

It’s the _here_ that makes Rey reconsider jabbing her belted weapon into his side and making a run for it. Were his First Order lackeys milling about in the surrounding throng? Were there enough that they would prove a serious obstacle?

Aloud, Kylo Ren bewilders her yet again. “For 10,000, it’d be a scam. You make a habit of swindling off-worlders?”

Rey’s free hand locks onto the saber hilt at her right hip, and the vendor seems to interpret the rapidly rising levels of tension in his stall as animosity towards him because he releases a shaky laugh and says, “Really, off-worlder? Why didn’t you say so, young miss? I took you for a native, and we Corellians do so love bartering. What do you say to 7,000?”

“Do I look like someone you want to try to cheat?” Quietly pronounced, but these words send the merchant bumbling into apologies, and Rey’s eyes drift up towards the face that still disconcerts her considering how unsinister Kylo Ren appears from certain angles.

And then he turns his head to look directly at her.

It’s impossible to ignore the scar. It shouldn’t surprise her, the freshly healed red and the violence implied in the mark’s prominent diagonal across the bridge of his nose. After all, at one point during their duel in the forest, she’d nearly listened to that voice, unearthed and unforgiving from somewhere inside her, urging her to kill him.

Now though, confusion eclipses her other thoughts as Kylo stipulates another price, less than half of what the merchant had originally put forth.

She doubts the merchant’s thin smile of acquiescence is due to any so-called love for bartering.

 

* * *

 

Her readiness to bolt at any moment is more than apparent, and so, as soon as they step out of the stall, the first words out of his mouth are, “You could run right now, and you know that would lead to a pursuit. You could also try wielding that lightsaber against me a second time, but keep in mind the odds wouldn’t be stacked in your favor this bout.”

“Real cocky words from someone I so recently beat into the snow,” she fires back.

“Incredible arrogance from an untrained brat,” he retorts, and the narrowing of her fierce eyes has him gritting his teeth in an attempt at a more conciliatory tone.

“Either scenario would lead to a commotion, which would result in news of our presence here being announced to the Supreme Leader, and I imagine such a situation would benefit neither your interest nor mine.”

Puzzlement in the scrunch of her brows. Grudgingly, she asks, “What are you doing here? Doesn't the First Order have more important business to deal with than bartering for ship parts?”

“I’m presuming that’s my mother’s money you’re spending and my father’s ship you’re repairing so technically, this is my business.” He regrets snapping this as soon as the words spill out, and anger threatens to crest forth from the cavity of his chest, irritation sparking that she has him speaking as Ben and not the man he is now.

“The father you killed,” Rey says, her voice laced with the acid Kylo feels bleeding into his thoughts as well. If there were a saber between them, he’s sure she would lance it through his heart at this very moment.

“Yes, the father I killed,” he acknowledges, willing his features to stone. As a witness to the act and its direct aftermath, she’d already seen too much of him. “The greatest test from Snoke. His disappointment with me was clear early on. Always suspecting that the blood on my hands wasn’t enough. For instance, he asked about the body count after we went through the Jedi Academy Skywalker sought to resurrect. I told him the bodies were piled too high to necessitate counting.”

Rey, it appears, might outshine him in even this: she is better at presenting a face of stone, of complete and utter rejection.

“I’m glad to have given you the scar,” she says, voice dipping to a low pitch, but the undercurrent of concentrated abhorrence is unmistakable. “It matches what I think of you.”

“Murderer, right? Monster? You know, I’ve had more than enough opportunity to kill you, Rey.” A tick in her jaw at Kylo’s use of her name, and then a tremor ripples through her whole frame as he informs her, “I could’ve done so when you were just a child running after me all the time to teach you.”

Her eyes grow wide and stricken with agitation. Child-like. _Eyes peering to him for reassurance, and finding none, tears fringe her lower lashes as drops of rain cling along the upper lash line. She had never looked at him with fear._

And now fear overrules all other emotions in her eyes as she looks at him.

“How are your dreams, Rey?” And it’s satisfying to see her expression, the confirmation of the first upper hand he’s gained on her since Takodana. To know that she dreams as he does.

Her hand clutches the hilt of the saber again, as if it were a toy to provide comfort.

“Skywalker’s weapon,” Kylo remarks, gaze following the movement of her hand. “You haven’t constructed your own yet. Not with the pace of his teaching. If I had stayed as his student, who knows how long I would have had to wait before making my own.”

The comment provokes an expected defense from her. “You have no right to say anything about him as a teacher.”

Enough of this. They may both be hooded, and disputes, barely restrained and otherwise, are not uncommon amidst the cacophony of the bazaar, but he’s already attuned to more than one pair of curious eyes straying in their direction.

He takes a step back, feet shifting towards the side where an alleyway interrupts the long row of vendor stalls. Questions teeming in her shadowed eyes, but he can’t be sure that she won’t plant a plasma blade through his torso if he leaves with a turned back. She’s not Luke after all.

“You want answers, Rey? Then you come to me.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

Part of her would almost prefer the meagerly stocked tents of Niima Outpost to her current environment, the disarray of the bazaar suddenly distressing. At least in the desert, she’d been able to detect returning threats. In this sort of crowd, her senses feel overwhelmed with the volume and vicinity of all that is buzzingly alive around her. If Kylo Ren decided that he wanted her dead after all and emerged from behind the next stranger she bumped into, Rey suspects that he would have the initial advantage of surprise.

How had he been able to find her? In all of their prior confrontations, Rey had felt the reach of his mind, the locking of his onto hers enhanced by physical proximity within the span of a room. She could understand the probable tracking of the Falcon to Corellia. She’d landed the ship at a private port, the one owned by Resistance sympathizers as suggested by Poe over the comm system, but a CorSec patrol could have picked up on the Falcon when she’d first entered the planet’s quadrant and could have transmitted that information to the First Order.

Kylo had managed to arrive at her exact location though. Was his grasp through the Force that strong then? Or had his reach grown stronger, with every brush of their two particular minds, specifically with regards to tracking her? And why had he stressed a mutual interest in avoiding the notice of his leader?

Moving briskly through the bazaar, Rey instinctively heads in the direction of the starport, intent on setting the Falcon on an immediate course back towards the master she has already accepted. She’s fishing her commlink out of the pouch of her belt and ready to tell Chewie to meet her back at the ship when her hands clench with the memory of their movement restrained, of her wrists locked in that interrogation chair. She stops dead in her tracks, feet veering in a half-circle, paranoia making her half-expectant to see Kylo trailing her, hunting her as he had on Takodana.

No, not hunting her particularly, she corrects herself. Searching for Luke. Of course, Kylo would want to send her into enough of a panic that she would fly back to Luke and lead him there. No need for a map if he could just locate Luke through her.

With a groan, she leans against the stem of an adjacent pillar, knuckles rapping the solidity at her back. Perhaps _she_ couldn’t leave this planet without Kylo Ren or the First Order noticing, but Chewie would perhaps be able to. If she could get him onto the right ship. And then he’d be able to warn Luke.

As for Kylo Ren, well, she would just have to deal with him alone.

 

* * *

 

_He’s too old to be babysitting a flock of toddlers on yet another trip to the Alliance War Museum. There’s one or two among the group who look to be around his age, maybe even a little older, but he hasn’t heard them speak a word of Basic, and he wonders why wasn’t one of their own around to explain everything about Coruscant to them._

_“You’re their guide, Ben, not a babysitter,” his mother had repeated, stilling his discontent with her hands on his shoulders and a groove between her eyes as she'd studied his averted face. “Luke’s trying to place the younglings with guardians as fast as he can, but he has to juggle that with his Academy responsibilities, and he can’t be everywhere at once.”_

_“Well why does he keep bringing back more of them before he even finds homes for the ones already here?”_

_Pursed lips from his mother, and Ben knows she’s about to recite statistics on orphaned refugees at him again. On more reluctant occasions, she’d dropped the words “Project Harvester” into the conversation. The Empire had been very interested in finding children like you, she’d told him, to take them away from their families and hide them in the Outer Rim. In facilities where their powers could be contained and researched, or trained in service to the Emperor if judged appropriate._

_His mother and uncle feel responsible for these children, Ben knows. An obligation to secure a better future, a home, for the children their father had helped steal. A better future. His mother was always talking about how things were better than they had been under the Emperor. Ben was now thirteen though. The war had ended before he’d even been born, and his mother as well as Uncle Luke were still working day and night to clean up the disorder resulting from the Empire’s fall._

_The group Ben’s shepherding is halfway through the Battle of Endor exhibit when a gentleman in a high-collared robe accosts him. Curator Bibble. Asking him for the third time whether his ‘esteemed’ father would consider relinquishing the Millennium Falcon to bequeath it to the museum. The man will have to keep on dreaming. If his father were forced to choose between that fossil of a ship and his own son, the more acerbic side of Ben thinks that Han would relinquish the latter._

_Having warded off the curator, Ben surveys the exhibit hall, counting the heads clustered near the displays. Seven. One less than there was before. He frowns. Where was the little girl? The one that was always playing around the courtyard, her muddied skirt and caf-brown mess of uncombed hair a familiar sight since she liked to watch him climb trees._

_Where was she?_

 

* * *

 

The two of them had decided that Chewie would leave the dining joint first. Hanging back, Rey slumps against the bar counter, one hand idly pushing the scraped-clean plate of her finished dinner. Hopefully, Chewbacca would be able to depart the Corellian system without unwanted attention and get her message to Luke. And hopefully, the Jedi would not leave his sanctuary to come collect his delayed student. She frowns at her plate. Why would he show up for her when no one else had, aside from Finn? Sure, Luke had acknowledged her potential, had laid out a pallet for her and had floated pebbles in circles around her head for her to seize or swat at. The Jedi hadn’t left the island for years though, to face his original wayward student, and Rey doubts her predicament is enough to send him coming.

Several hours since she has last seen Kylo Ren, and she’s still somewhat expecting him to materialize out of the nowhere, to suddenly become the diner sitting in the shadowy corner. Closing her eyes, she rubs at her temples, letting her awareness cast out a net, the probe diffuse and loose as advised by Luke, her perception combing through the dense field of energy and consciousness. On the island cliffs during morning meditation, there had only been one mind to commune with, one pulse in the Force near her own. In this dining area alone, over twenty sources of projecting as well as quickly smoke-screened thoughts. Multiplying into the hundreds if she reaches outside the establishment’s walls, into the thousands, into the millions. She feels like a lost navigator at the holographic center of a defeatingly immense star-chart.

She reaches. No longer in this restaurant. No longer in this section of town at all.

And, as if magnetized, she feels herself pulled, wrenched, until she is standing somewhere she has never been.

_Rey._

_He’s_ standing somewhere she has never been. She can see the red banner of the First Order draped on the wall near him. He needed to be seen here. To enact a pretense of Order-sanctioned business on Corellia.

_Rey._

She nearly severs the link, skeptical again about whether she wants to find him at all, about whether any answers he could provide would be worth it.

Kylo already has a sense of where she is though, and he’s leaving, his conversation curtly discontinued. At the threshold of the building, his long stride slows, and he shuts _her_ out so abruptly that it feels like the first slap of water from a spasmodic hose.

She’s curious, in spite of herself, but she’s not about to push at his walls while they’re not in an interrogation chamber. A minute later though, an impatient probe, as peevish as he’d sound aloud. _Are you coming or not?_

_Where? How am I supposed to find you?_

She grits her teeth because she can feel how pleased he is, at knowing that she’s taking him up on his deal, but then Kylo gives a sign that he’s not completely different from her Jedi master.

_I meant it when I said, you come to me. First lesson. Figure out how to find me._

What was it, Rey wonders with a roll of her eyes, about Force-users and their games of hide and seek?

She gets up and moves toward the door.

 

* * *

 

_Ben pushes past the other museum visitors, his eyes scanning each hall for a little girl._

_She’s distressed. He can feel it now. The other children are Force-sensitive, but she’s emitting a call he can hear more clearly than the spoken exchanges around him. He whirls, and this direction feels more right than the other one. He follows the rapid thrumming of her pulse, and there she is, jerking her arm away from the towering figure of Chairman Snoke._

_“Ben!” She scampers towards him, and he’s a little embarrassed by how he has to address the leader of the Utapaun state while a toddler clutches his leg._

_“Ben Organa-Solo,” the Chairman remarks, grey lips peeling back to reveal a set of highly...acute teeth. But Pau’aun teeth always looked like that. Ready to devour. “I was just about to return this little one to you, but it looks like she’s perfectly capable of making that journey on her own. How has your mother been?”_

_“She’s in good health, sir. I’ll tell her you asked after her.”_

_“No need. And your studies with Master Skywalker? Proceeding well I hope?”_

_Ben straightens, clears his throat before he answers. “They’re going well, if I say so myself, sir. I think I’d learn more though if my mother didn’t call me back from the Academy so often and if I had more time with my uncle.”_

_The Chairman’s smile had never been a pleasant sight, but it seems to turn candidly disdainful. His eyes flicker between the girl’s face, cringing as she is behind Ben’s leg, and the boy’s. “Well, if you ever lose interest in...caring for younglings, you should stop by the Pau’an delegation’s office.”_

_“Your office, sir?”_

_Those deep-set eyes glint at him, their sheen like that of obsidian armor. “The knowledge we want is not always found where we expect it, Ben. Come by one day, and you might discover that your uncle is not the only one who knows the art of using the Force.”_

_He stares after the Chairman's departing form, the Pau'aun's words reverberating through his head, the echo of it familiar. A whisper like trailing smoke. Interrupted by a physical tug, the girl making a fist against the back of his knee and plucking at the cloth there. Oh right. Seven other kids he has to go back and babysit._

_In the transport shuttle, on their way home, Ben gives up on reading the history of the Jedi Order that Uncle Luke had suggested he try and looks around the cabin, his bored gaze falling on his tiny seat mate. She’d wandered off twice before, once on another inner-city trip and the other time from the interim shelter of his uncle’s apartment. Both times because she’d apparently seen a woman who looked like her mother. That woman, he suddenly remembers, had died a few weeks ago._

_“Hey, after today, no more wandering okay?”_

_The little girl looks up at him, and he sighs. “If you ever do get lost again,” he murmurs. A tap to the center of her forehead. “Do what you did today. I’ll find you. Or maybe one day, you’ll actually learn how to use your head and find me.”_

_He had no idea a child could look so offended, and he’s taken aback when she reaches up, she has to stand up on the seat in fact, to place her pudgy hands fully on his face._

_She reaches out again, but not with her palms, and her mind is incandescent, a corona when he shuts his eyes._

_“Okay then,” he says, furrow developing between his brows. “Do that, and I should definitely able to find you anywhere.”_

_A nose-wrinkling sneeze from the girl, and with that, the link collapses._

 

* * *

 

She’s trekked across the city via two transports and a solid ten-minute walk on foot when she decides that she’s going no further. The tiled streets are lined with gentle jets of fountain water here, the stone and glass facades of the Governmental Sector’s buildings lying just ahead. Corellia may not have sworn formal allegiance to the First Order, but she knows from her peek inside his head that the Order has its agents and representatives concentrated in this district.

Kylo Ren has been perplexingly quiet on his side. Crossing her arms, Rey waits by the pedestal of one of the giant statues populating the quadrangle.

_Are you going to show that mask of yours around here anytime soon or not?_

She gets an answer through his eyes. He’s facing the same set of hewn stairs, the same government building looming over both of them. But that would mean --

Rey whirls.

 

And there he is.

 

 


End file.
